Echoes down some windy halls

Echoes down some windy halls

A few dim stars anemically ride the vapored inner night,
sparks of pride made watery by the cumulus in his mind.

The beating heart is a metronome, counterpointed by the
creak of bedsprings, and the chirps of his guardian indoor
crickets.

This artist’s studio is in summer so hot that the air shimmers
in the liquid, sodden heat, the humidity strangling all hope of
creative thought.

Now the darkness shimmers with the nocturnal chirps,
and his restless dreams of motorized banality.

In the echoic hall the walls are propped up by abstracted
canvases, pride torn and reset in hard edge certainty.
Now just some coloured tents for the watching crickets.

He’s here awake in the darkness, in this world again
and his mind aches to just function.

There’s a taste in his mouth of profound numbness,
like intoxication, because joy has fled and the sadness
has come again like it always does.

Like a cloud it comes, a vapored thing, nebulas, creeping,
it tortured him with scattered dreams so inane that his mind
was soon driven to wakefulness.

In the dark he chanted his litany, the one he always used
when the mad, bad, gloomy grief monster enveloped his
soul.

“Nothing, no one, no where!”

Chanted as if to cancel himself out of existence, soon he knew
the sun would rise and the demon would be again consigned to
it's stony cavern.

And as dawns false promise fills the sky, he speeds to his work,
but as he treads through the empty streets in the deserted artist’s
hall, a cat awakes momentarily, as the first shafts of light lance
through the fly blown panes.

It flicks its ears disinterestedly as a cloud half-visible in the shadow
mote by mote dissolves before the suns reaching fingers.

“Next time" the shadow whispers as it echoes down the windy hall.